Blonde on Blonde

Blonde on Blonde is a folk rock album by Bob Dylan, generally believed to be the rock and roll genre's first double album. Recorded in Nashville, it was produced by Bob Johnston and was released in 1966. The album was a critical and commercial success, though folk music purists continued to protest Dylan's fusion of folk with rock that began with Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home.

The Songs

Salon.com critic Bill Wyman praised Blonde on Blonde for its songs and performances, writing that " singing alone is a catalog of the human emotion genome, excepting perhaps mercy. Dylan swaggers, brags, sighs, loves, loses, smiles, grieves, pleads, lusts, swoons and trips - and that's just on 'Pledging My Time' and 'Visions of Johanna.' The album contains 'Just Like a Woman,' a love song so elegant and confused it's not clear today, nearly 35 years later, whether it is insufferably condescending or startlingly loving. Another picaresque, 'Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,' has his most canny female character -- Ruthie, who tells him that his debutante just knows what he needs, but she knows what he wants. The album ends with a song that took up an entire album side back in the vinyl days, a love song to Sara Dylan, 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,' more feverish and disturbed than even Van Morrison's Astral Weeks."

Related Topics:
Salon.com - Astral Weeks

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" opens Blonde on Blonde with "a Salvation Army sound," as Dylan describes it. Wyman referred to it as a "stoner anthem" due to its drunk atmosphere and the continual use of the word "stoned" ("But I would not feel so all along / Everybody must get stoned"), but as Clinton Heylin writes, the song generated "some controversy among those unconversant with Proverbs 27:15." ("A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike.")

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Though every song on Blonde on Blonde has received a fair share of critical acclaim, the most important and celebrated song on the double-album is arguably "Visions of Johanna." Heylin wrote that it was perhaps "his most perfect composition. The song's imagery is bone-chillingly precise, even as its subject matter, the omnipresent yet physically absent Johanna, hovers nebulously out of reach."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

NPR's Tim Riley writes that "'Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again' may be rock's grandest costume piece, balancing displacement and alienation with the offhand hatchet job (Shakespeare hitting on a French girl, the preacher 'dressed / With twenty pounds of headlines / Stapled to his chest')."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

When Dylan played an early acetate of "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" to his friend, Jules Siegel, he told him, "Now that is religious music! That is religious carnival music. I just got that real old-time religious carnival sound there, didn't I?"

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~